Modern business organizations are subject to a greater degree of regulatory scrutiny than ever before. Regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) impose specific reporting and record keeping requirements on certain classes of businesses. For instance, the record keeping requirements may specify the length of time certain categories of documents must be maintained. Records may be kept longer than the specified time, but cannot be destroyed earlier than the specified time period. As an example, certain types of documents must be retained for a minimum of seven years.
Despite the regulatory requirements for maintaining documents, business organizations have a strong need to legally destroy documents. This need stems primarily from the extremely large volume of space occupied by both printed and electronic records. In order to balance the burden of maintaining documents in a manner compliant with regulatory requirements and the need to legally destroy documents, companies often define a paperwork retention schedule. A paperwork retention schedule is typically defined by a company's records manager. The paperwork retention schedule defines the period of time that various classes should be retained for. For example, a paperwork retention schedule may indicate that all contracts should be destroyed after seven years.
Traditional paperwork retention schedules are somewhat helpful in scheduling the destruction of documents. However, these schedules also suffer from a number of serious drawbacks. First, it is often difficult to practically implement a paperwork retention schedule. Moreover, because paperwork retention schedules utilize fixed destruction dates, it is possible for a document to be destroyed inadvertently. For instance, a contract may be marked for destruction after seven years. If the contract is amended or supplemented within the seven year period, the original contract may still be destroyed after the initial seven year period. This lack of flexibility when computing the retention period makes traditional paperwork retention schedules less than desirable for many organizations.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the various embodiments of the present invention have been made.